RICH AND POOR.
.T AM sure I wonder that the poor are not more envious I than they are !;' This is a sentence we often hear upon the lips of well-to-do people. The speaker means that the poor do envy the rich, and are excusable on the ground that thelatter are supremely enviable. As a matter of fact, these two propositions contain between them very little truth. Those who believe in them ground their belief upon emotion rather than upon reason, and betray as much self-conscious- ness, as sympathy. The rich are very liable to seizures of sentimental pity, and some of them suffer chronically from " swelled head." They ought to take these two undoubted tendencies into consideration when they criticise the attitude of the poor. The mass of the hand-workers do not think very much about the rich, and do not indulge in self-pity at all. Do you then mean, it may be asked, that all the poor are pdfectly contented ? Of course not. Neither is any other class of men. The miserable must envy the comfortable, just as the sick man envies the healthy one. But if a man feels well- i.e., is habitually unconscious of his body, enjoys his meals, his day's work, and his night's rest—he will not, unless be is a hypochondriac, disturb himself by envying other men's bodily prowess; indeed, be gives the best of all proofs that he does not envy it,—he watches it with genuine pleasure and admira- tion. He knows he will not live a day less because be has not the specialised strength of this football player or that bicyclist. The power to jump this obstacle or carry that weight will not bring him an ounce of luck or spare him a single misfortune. He feels quite well, and is, so far as he knows, quite strong, and that is all he minds about. He has no sense that the athletic expert is his physical superior, but it amuses him to watch, and even to read about, his doings. The cases of the comfortable poor man and his rich neigh- bour are analogous. During nine-tenths of his time the workman does not think about the man of means at all, but thinks, as we all do, about his own concerns,—Lie work, his prospects, his wife, his children, and his news- paper. When he does think about the rich man, he thinks, so to speak, dramatically. He is interested—partly because his wife is interested—in the way he orders his life, and he thinks more of him if he does it with a certain regard to appearance, and even, perhaps, display. He likes him to show neighbourly feeling, but to show it with due regard for ceremony. 06 course, he likes sympathy when he is in trouble, but that is not because he is poor, but because he is human. If he gets it he will return it in full measure, especially where the trouble he sees concerns health.
We must admit that it is not easy to say definitely who the " comfortable " poor man is,—almost as difficult as it is to say who the healthy man is. He is a reality ; if we may defy grammar, he is a majority. But just as we can- not lay down an invariable rule as to how much exercise, how much food, and how much sleep are necessary to keep a man in health, so we cannot say how much wages will enable a man to be " comfortable." All we can say is that certain sanitary conditions tend to ill-health, and certain economic conditions to a life of misery. How far the individual physique or the individual character may have power to neutralise or to rise above these conditions it is impossible accurately to compute. Only two people among the acquaintance of the present writer have ever described themselves in his hearing as " having everything." Both were women, one the wife of a skilled workman with a growing family and something under two pounds a week, the other an old woman with a weekly income of about five shillings above her rent. The former lived in the country, the latter in a poor part of Marylebone. Both made use of the phrase in connection with the pity they felt for the poor. Both thought that they might be objects of envy, but to neither did it occur that they might envy any other class of persons. Naturally, among the uncomfortable poor, things are different. It is difficult for men and, women who have been specially unfortunate not to feel their misfortunes more keenly when they see the prosperity of those about them. No doubt it ought not to be so ; but so it ie. The less fortunate poor do, it is true, feel envy, but seldom, we think, envy of the rich. In the mind of the, average man—who is not a bad man—envy is nothing worse than ambition enervated and embittered by misfortune. Ambition moves us all to climb the hill of prosperity step • by step ; it inspires a practical desire to stand level with those just above us, not an impractical longing to fly over their heads and alight somewhere in the dim distance. If, for instance, a man falls out of work and finds himself in danger of the workhouse, while he sees his sister, with no claims upon her such as he has and no immediate anxiety as to her future, living happily in service with employers who respect and like her, lie naturally feels envious. At first he asks her help to enable him to live as comfortably as she lives ; at last he too often actually " sponges " upon her. It is very sad, but sometimes it really seems inevitable. Anyhow, it is natural. But it is upon the sister, not upon the employer, that his envy fastens. To take another illustration, the present writer was hearing the other day a graphic account from an eyewitness of a meeting for the discussion of Socialism held in a poor parish in Newcastle. Two or three gentlemen spoke, and after them an artisan, an engineer by trade, who had got some education for himself, and had probably earned a steady fifty shillings a week for a long time. This man was evidently cheerfully convinced that he was at the top of the tree ; that he owed, as he doubtless did, his exalted position to his own exertions ; and that the millennium would soon arrive if every one acted with as much energy and wisdom as he had done. After him came a low-class agitator, a casual labourer. He implored the audience to pay no, attention to the speech they had just heard, as the, speaker, belonged to the aristocracy of labour, and did not know the
poor. All through his speech he showed that he envied, and to some extent even bated, the artisan, but he showed no feeling whatever against the gentlemen who had spoken, no doubt in better taste, upon the same lines. We do not for a moment mean that the majority of the very poor hate the class above them ; but if they do happen to be envious people, that is the line their envy takes, as the agitator very well knew.
The only class of persons who do openly express hitter envy of the rich are tramps, and they, we believe, envy them not so much their wealth as what they believe to be their idleness. They do not envy the comfortable workman ; not they. He, they know, has to toil from morning to night, and restrict himself in his pleasures, and take anxious thought for his wife and children. They envy people whom they see sitting dressed in good clothes behind horses or motor engines, and for the moment doing nothing. Between these happy persons they allow of no distinction. The country doctor • flying by in his car, who has been up all night, and very likely expects to be at work all day, and the over- strained lawyer or merchant who saves himself from a nervous breakdown by spending his nights and his Sundays in the country, and who drives a good-looking horse to the station every morning, appear in the eyes of the tramp to be as idle as a pleasure party bound for the races.
Respectable English human nature is very much alike in all classes, and if ordinary professional people would look at home they would realise that the envious imagination in England is a highly restricted, and not at all a dangerous, thing. We should all like a little more money; we wish we could do as our friend So-and-so does, live in such a house as his, or enjoy such holidays; but we do not envy the great millionaires of America ally more than we envy the Royal Families of Europe. We may have our views about how they ought to be treated.
• We may believe them to be an advantage, or fear them to be a danger, to the States which harbour them; but that is a mere question of our political opinions, of our ideas as to the best method of bringing about the greatest good of the greatest number. In England we all want to better our- selves ; but, on the other hand, we have a good opinion of ourselves as we are. Most men feel in their hearts pretty certain that the class to which they belong produces, at its best, the best men in the country, and that those men, when they are healthy and lucky and able, have the best time. This is the attitude of mind which will always, as we believe, keep this country from Socialism, while it will at the same time ▪ spur it forward to the improvement of social conditions. " The pride which inspires often tends to modify envy." These words were said by La Rochefoucauld, but they are more applicable in England than in F?ance.
Previous page
